I enjoy cross blog conversations that explore an idea space . . . the yes but, yes and, and another thought sort of conversation that isn't a tightly directed or purposeful navigation to some final certainty so much as the complicating fleshing out of a set of related insights. It's more midrash than ordnung.

The previous post - with food issues central as you might expect given the theme of this blog - was a peripatetic meditation on the harms that come from either elevating the views of some individual or group to the status of law, or tinkering by authorities to engineer cherished socio-economic outcomes. It meandered from Smith to Ridley to Wilkinson, and now Wilkinson further enlarges the loosely coupled set of comments: Why Climate Alarmism Alarms Me.

Matt Ridley . . . states my own view nicely:

What the precautionary principle [the idea that when science has not yet determined whether a new product or process is safe, the government should prohibit or restrict its use] misses is the danger that in not progressing you might miss out on future improvements in living standards for poor people in Africa. I’m desperately hoping to persuade the world, not that everything’s going to be fine, but that there’s a chance everything’s going to be better for everybody and that we should be very careful not to cut ourselves off from that chance.

Cheap energy is a main source of prosperity. The effort to make the cheapest sources of energy more expensive is, in effect, an effort to ensure that more people are made to suffer longer in poverty. Energy Secretary Stephen Chu’s openness to using tariffs against countries like China as a “weapon” in the effort to achieve global climate policy coordination illustrates the clear and present danger climate alarmism poses to the welfare of the world’s poor. I’m simply unwilling to trade certain immediate harm to vulnerable people in exchange for extremely uncertain future benefits.

Do I get points for linking Ridley to Wilkinson in the previous post, now that they are linking each other? Just sayin'.

Economics, climate, energy and food are all related and all under threat from those who would impose their narrow preferences without regard for either the broad effects of those preferences on others, or even their future selves. I'm not saying that their preferences are wrong (though that is sometimes the case) so much as that there are others who have different preferences appropriate to their circumstances and that all prosper when each has the freedom to pursue their preferences, not least those who are most in need.